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He glanced about him and then spread his arms and flung them forward again, which caused the snow lying on either side of the street in banks and valleys to rise up in a wave, growing in size until it was clear that Havelock had summoned all the snow in the street, and possibly the neighbouring streets as well. It didn’t move like snow, but like some sort of creature, humping its way along the cobblestones, a crevasse opening at its forefront like a gaping mouth. This horizontal avalanche slammed itself into the remaining apprentices and swept them away, buried beneath its depths.

Havelock turned to Valérie. His face was pale and cold, and in his eyes I saw only the darkness of the Rivenwood, nothing of Havelock himself. He reached towards the sky, and churning ribbons of cloud lowered themselves towards his hand, crackling with lightning that steamed and fizzed when it touched the falling snow.

But Valérie was no longer outside the shop—she was running. Her boots pounded against the sidewalk as she fled towards the square, and she seemed to be clutching something to her chest—a large, dark shape, wriggling wildly.

“Your Majesty!” I screamed. “Put him down!”

Naturally, Valérie paid me no heed, if she even heard me. At first, I thought she was going to charge into the crowd, which had been distracted by Havelock’s weather magic, mouths agape in identical looks of horror. Whatever Havelock had summoned would not be able to reach her without risking the bystanders.

That thought made me still. Would Havelock risk the bystanders’ lives to get at Valérie? He wasn’t himself. I wrestled with Élise, who was still maintaining her grip, though I was unsure if it was His Majesty or Havelock I wanted to reach.

But Valérie didn’t plunge into the crowd. She shouted another incantation, and a door appeared before her, a door attached to nothing at all. It was as beautiful as any of her other enchantments, blackened mahogany with eight intricately carved panels—a story, I thought, given their arrangement, but it was there for only a heartbeat before Valérie pushed through it and vanished, the door folding itself up and trailing behind her, as if it had been turned to cloth she had tugged from a clothesline. A man standing at the forefront of the crowd gave a gasp and fell backwards into another man, clearly thinking Valérie would run through the door and into him, but she—and the door—were already gone.

For a moment, I was too stunned to comprehend it. Surely it hadn’t been His Majesty in her arms—what would she want with him? But when I looked back on the memory, I could see nothing but a single detail: a long black tail curved around Valérie’s side, thrashing wildly.

“Your Majesty!” I shouted, finally wrenching free of Élise and charging into the street. “Your Majesty!”

Nobody paid me any attention—everyone was focused on either the place where Valérie had vanished or where Havelock stood. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him summon his own door and vanish through it, to another chorus of screams, but I was beyond caring about Havelock, or any other magician for that matter.

“Your Majesty!” I cried again, blundering down the sidewalk, now clear of every scrap of snow, for it had all been bundled into the avalanche Havelock had summoned. And though I called and called, there was no response, until Élise caught up with me, and I collapsed into her arms and wept.

I slept little the next few days, and poorly. I also spent far too much of my time crying. While I kept the shelter open and my checklists up-to-date, because I would not fail the cats, no matter what calamity had befallen me, I kept having to remove myself to the back room so as not to upset our visitors with my tears. People continued to pass through our doors in large numbers, even if it was mostly to gawk at the epicentre of the greatest magical drama the city had seen in years.

Élise did what she could to comfort me. “Surely she’ll return him,” she said. “Once she realizes what he is, and how little Havelock cares for him. No doubt that’s why she took him in the first place.”

This last I believed, despite being unable to conceive of a more unlikely hostage than His Majesty, nor one less desirable for Havelock to ransom. Valérie had taken him out of desperation—her plan of breaking into Havelock’s workshop having gone awry, she had stolen what she could. Perhaps she’d taken the violence of His Majesty’s attack as evidence of some mutual regard with Havelock, rather than merely the manifestation of the cat’s diabolical nature.

Élise’s voice grew quiet, and she touched my arm. “You don’t know that he isn’t still alive.”

I allowed her to pull me into her shoulder, my tears falling once more. Of course it wasn’t just that keeping me from sleep. His Majesty had been Robin’s cat—he’d never truly been mine. And I’d lost him.

I’d never realized before how entangled my feelings for His Majesty were with my feelings for Robin, the invisible webwork holding them together. I will not say that I felt as if I’d lost Robin all over again, because nothing could be so destructive as that, but certainly it was as if the half-healed wound had been pierced, and the pain was exquisite.

Havelock repaired the shelter within an hour of Valérie’s attack, and then he vanished through another door, this one made of glittering bronze, which he summoned from the blizzard that had descended upon the city. But wherever Valérie had gone, Havelock could not track her, and he eventually returned to his workshop to sulk, or perhaps to scheme—I was too distraught to concern myself with him.

I was also disagreeably busy. Not only did we have to endure endless questions from the public, but two police officers I did not recognize turned up on our doorstep not long after Havelock completed his repairs. I would not have thought that any explanation could have appeased them, but I should have known better than to underestimate Élise.

She invited the police in with a desperate warmth, as if nothing could have come as a greater relief than their presence. Valérie’s interest in our shelter—which naturally dozens of witnesses had confirmed, even if none had overheard our conversation—she blamed on the baker who had fled some months ago, who, Élise had heard, had been given to welcoming strange visitors, some of whom continued to turn up on our doorstep regularly, to much mutual confusion. Valérie had asked for the baker by name, Élise claimed, and refused to believe he was no longer in residence. Somehow—the logic escaped me, but Élise was nothing if not a consummate storyteller, and made even leaps of logic perfectly convincing—she made clear her suspicions that the baker may have been Havelock Renard in disguise. Élise furthermore insisted that the police search the shop from top to bottom to clear it of any hazardous Artefacts this supposed baker may have left behind.

Naturally I quailed at this, and made to argue with her, but Élise only shot me one of her brief, murderous looks, and I fell silent.

They marched in, their gruffness markedly reduced after listening to Élise’s wide-eyed fabrication, one of them even pausing to compliment our cats. We offered them almond croissants from the batch I’d rescued from the oven the previous night, and they accepted with pleasure.

Naturally they found the trapdoor, and I watched them descend the stairs in a kind of frozen panic, certain that this was the end of everything I had worked for.

But it was gone. The workshop, the Artefacts—everything. The officers came marching back upstairs looking perfectly unperturbed, one brushing a stray cobweb from her hair. I stared through the open trapdoor, which revealed a cellar barely high enough to stand in, containing mostly empty shelves, two broken chairs, and a few half-empty bags of flour.

“How did you know?” I murmured to Élise.

She shook her head. “I didn’t. It was a gamble. But given the number of ridiculous enchantments Havelock has placed on this building, I guessed he might have come up with one to pull the wool over the eyes of the police.”

I hadn’t expected the officers to believe us and go away, particularly given the rumours floating around about our shelter, but go away they did, though their belief did not seem absolute—they spent considerable time muttering to each other out of earshot.

Initially I had wondered why Laurent had not been part of the investigation, but as the days passed I forgot all about him—until he sent a telegram reminding me of our festival date, together with a meeting place and time.

“I can’t,” I said to Élise, showing her the telegram. “I can’t imagine dudding up and going out, not with everything that’s happened. I will have to cancel.”

She grimaced. “I won’t try to force you, dear. But what will he think? Can we afford to increase his suspicions even further? Also, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a way to get Laurent on our side. Would he help us, if he knew all? Yes, he’s with the law, but he’s also a man, and he obviously cares for you.”